Rare Afro-Americana: A Reconstruction of the Adger Library. A Reference Publication in Black Studies. Wendy Ball , Tony Martin

Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional music theory is not immune from such institutional racism—its insistence on normative musical behaviors is founded on the (white) phallogocentrism of Western thought. Does the resurgent academic interest in improvisation offer a way out? No, at least not as it is currently studied. Even an apparently impartial approach such as cognitive science is not neutral; perception is colored by race. To get anywhere, this chapter argues, improvisation studies must take difference seriously. Important impetus for a more inclusive critical model comes from such fields as Black studies, Women’s studies, subaltern studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

Download Full-text

Humanism and the Human

The Oxford Handbook of Humanism ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190921538.013.14 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Joseph Winters

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Michel Foucault ◽

Karl Marx ◽

Black Studies ◽

Black Feminism ◽

Working Through ◽

A Site ◽

The Ideal ◽

Sylvia Wynter

This chapter engages humanism and its fundamental assumptions by working through critical theory, black feminism, and black studies. It contends that there is a tension at the heart of humanism—while the ideal human appears to be the most widespread and available category, it has been constructed over and against certain qualities, beings, and threats. To elaborate on this tension, this chapter revisits the work of authors like Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. Marx acknowledges that the human is a site of conflict and antagonism even as his thought betrays a lingering commitment to progress and humanism. Foucault goes further than Marx by underscoring the fabricated quality of man and the ways in which racism functions to draw lines between those who must live and those who must die. In response to Marx and Foucault’s tendency to privilege Europe, this chapter engages black feminism and Afro-pessimism—Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Frank Wilderson—who show how the figure of the human within humanism is defined in opposition to blackness.

Download Full-text

Toward an expanded approach on Black mobilities

Progress in Human Geography ◽

10.1177/03091325211030329 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 030913252110303

Author(s):

Bradley Hinger

Keyword(s):

Research Agenda ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Black Studies ◽

White People ◽

Inherent Characteristic ◽

Black Geographies ◽

Forced Movement

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

Download Full-text

Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies by Rita Kiki Edozie and Curtis Stokes, eds

Michigan Historical Review ◽

10.1353/mhr.2015.0034 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 41 (2) ◽

pp. 105-106

Author(s):

Saladin Ambar

Keyword(s):

Black Studies

Download Full-text

Homenagem: Remembering the Life and Work of Abdias Nascimento

Journal of Black Studies ◽

10.1177/00219347211011587 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002193472110115

Author(s):

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry ◽

Anani Dzidzienyo

Keyword(s):

Military Service ◽

Black Studies ◽

Central Component ◽

Special Issue ◽

Art And Politics ◽

Black Politicians ◽

Brown University ◽

Black World ◽

The Relationship

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento’s views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition.

Download Full-text

The Anthropocene blues: Notes from Mississippi

The Anthropocene Review ◽

10.1177/20530196211001507 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 205301962110015

Author(s):

Jason Ludwig

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

Environmental Change ◽

Political Thought ◽

Black Studies ◽

Political Practice ◽

Power Structures ◽

Ecological Degradation ◽

Intellectual Traditions ◽

Racial Injustice ◽

Black Political Thought

This article argues for the importance of integrating histories of enslaved Africans and their descendants—including histories of resistance to racialized power structures—within narratives about the Anthropocene. It suggests that the Black Studies Scholar Clyde Wood’s concept of the “blues epistemology” offers conceptual tools for considering how Black political and intellectual traditions have strived to imagine and create a more livable world amid the entangled crises of racial injustice and ecological degradation. I argue that locating Black political thought within broader narratives of environmental change and economic development illuminates the racial dimensions of current global ecological crises and orients scholarship and political practice toward the spaces in which such thought is being animated today in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Download Full-text